TLDR: WATCH THE VIDEO (click above)
What’s the one thing that could make me break my Peloton streak? A Peloton app teardown. 🏋️♀️
3 things you’ll learn from watching this:
How long it really takes to form a habit
1 fundamental way that Peloton has made workouts easier
Peloton’s smart twist on streaks & how it incentivizes me to work out
And now back to my streak. Next time: Peloton parts 2 and 3. 🎬
You’ll learn where Peloton has opportunities and which future features I’m most excited about.
Note: This is a NEW series of product teardowns. Subscribe below to get future ones. Hit “subscribe.”
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👂 Transcript:
Today we are going to be looking at Peloton. This is the Peloton app, and as you can see, I like Peloton. I have a five week streak going on with Peloton. And the cool thing about the Peloton app – which by the way is different than the bike; this is the app focused on workouts - is that Peloton’s incentive is the same as my incentive.
We both want me to create a habit. So more times than not, apps’ incentives are not aligned with your incentive and they want you to use the app more than you want to use the app. But Peloton is different. But the problem is they do have an uphill battle in front of them. So creating a habit is hard in general.
It takes a long time. In fact, one of the biggest myths that we have is that creating a habit takes. It takes 21 days. That is a complete myth. It does not, and in fact, it takes way longer, and specifically for exercise. There's some research that suggests it takes six weeks, four times a week working out. Other research suggests nine weeks.
A sad paper came out and said 256 days. And so creating a habit for working out is going to be tough for Peloton. And so in this teardown, we are going to look at a few ways that they try to get me to do it, and I think successfully, and a few opportunities that they have in front of them to help me exercise and help them drive active use.
Peloton does three things really nicely when it comes to getting me to work out every day, or at least every week. So the first thing they do is make workouts easier. So it used to be that I'd have to go to the gym for 45 minutes. I'd drive there, get out, do a workout, come back… Now I can sneak in a 10-minute arm workout in between meetings.
By making workouts shorter, they've actually made it easier for people to fit it into their day. The mental model now isn't “take an hour.” It's “take 10 minutes” and everyone can take 10 minutes. I love, by the way, the 10 minute arm, 10 minute core. So principle number one, make it easy. And they've done that in a fundamental way.
It's not just changing a button. They've really structured this, that the whole class structure to be about fitting into your day. The second thing that Peloton does really well are streaks, and I really like how they do streaks. So streaks in general, buzzword and gamification. You know, you try to get somebody to do something every day by giving them some points or some reward or some visual about what they're doing.
So this shows my five week streak, but that's the thing, it's not an “every day” thing. So the research on streaks suggests that actually if you miss a day, you're okay that you're not gonna completely fall off the wagon and lose motivation, but if you miss more than one day, and the experiment here was done in a Danish fitness center where they looked at people coming back from Easter break and saw that people who had a multiple day break actually continue to work out less after that break. And so what Peloton does really cleverly is incentivize me with weeks. So I'm not gonna miss multiple weeks in a row, but they're basically giving me points, rewards, acknowledgement for coming back every week. I really like this. By the way, they could probably go even harder, right?
They're just doing this at the top of the app. I don't get any notifications about my streak. I don't get any real kind of buy-in for it, but they're giving me this awareness that I have worked out five weeks in a row.
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